Six Challenges for Managing Enterprise Technology Solved with the First Six ETM Use Cases

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In writing my Amazon bestselling book The Next CIO, I interviewed twelve CIOs to identify key challenges facing current CIOs.

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One consensus? Manual processes still plague IT, and restrict the present CIOs’ ability to digitally transform IT, and run a more efficient, secure, and compliant, autonomous IT operation.

This challenge of manual IT processes creates in two foundational obstacles:

• First, to realize autonomous IT, CIOs need the rapid automation of IT processes, such as employee off-boarding and IT audit readiness, within days to weeks, not months to years. Current approaches require IT running time consuming and expensive projects, building custom solutions, and draining limited IT resources.
• Second, these processes need to be informed with accurate asset data. As the former Cisco CIO shared: “Automating with garbage data, just makes the garbage go faster.”

Unfortunately, the tools and approaches current CIOs have available to manage enterprise technology, simply aren’t working, leading to six foundational challenges.

Six Challenges to Managing Enterprise Technology

One: Lack of Accurate Asset Visibility and Inventory Controls

Many IT departments don't have accurate visibility into their entire technology asset landscape, and are unable to answer even basic questions like: What assets do we have, who has them, and where are they right now?

For example, a Fortune 25 company found traditional IT Asset Management tools inadequate to answer these types of questions. So, they tried to use a CMDB, but discovered it was too expensive and time-consuming, trying to keep their CMDB configured correctly. Plus, they couldn’t trust their CMDB, as its was found to not be very accurate. In fact, some reports state that CMDBs on average are only about 60% accurate.

Next, this Fortune 25 company considered developing an in-house solution. However, they quickly realized that this approach would require months, if not years to implement. Additionally, they’d have the ongoing resource drain of supporting, updating and upgrading the custom solution. Plus, the employees that wrote the code would likely leave, taking their knowledge with them.

Two: Asset Protection

With poor visibility, ensuring the protection of assets such as laptops becomes challenging, as you can’t secure what you can’t see. For instance, an MDM tool might report that a laptop is secure, while the endpoint protection software could miss an update, leaving that same laptop vulnerable.

Three: IT Audit Preparation

When you have manual processes, you can't guarantee an accurate audit trail, you can’t guarantee accurate asset data, and you can’t guarantee strict adherence to your policies. This all makes it expensive to manually prepare for an IT audit. Of course, it’s even more expensive if you fail the audit.

Four: Meeting Compliance Requirements

All compliance frameworks require inventory controls, and meeting these frameworks is impossible without a record of managed technology. Without accurate inventory controls, organizations are constantly at risk of non-compliance.

Five: Wasted Budget Spend

Manual processes and inevitable rework are expensive, leading to inefficient spend of limited IT budget, versus letting less expensive computer cycles complete the bulk of the tasks.

Six: Poor IT Employee Experiences

Manual tasks often burden IT staff with tedious work, versus letting them focus their efforts on more strategically supporting the business.

Enter Enterprise Technology Management

To overcome these challenges, the book The Next CIO introduces a new category of application, known as Enterprise Technology Management, or ETM. Like how CRM supports sales, and HRM supports HR, ETM is designed to support CIOs and their IT teams:

• More easily and accurately manage their entire enterprise technology landscape, while also
• Quickly automating common IT processes
• On the journey to realizing the vision of autonomous IT.

ETM is built on two foundational elements: Workflow Applications and Modern Technology Asset Management.

Workflow Applications

Workflow Applications provide pre-configured, standardized applications that automate common IT processes in days to weeks, not months to years.?

Modern Technology Asset Management

Modern Technology Asset Management goes beyond traditional IT Asset Management, offering features such as:

• A workflow designer with a drag and drop, no-code user interface to configure and build workflows.
• Business intelligence capabilities to provide reports, alerts and notifications.
• Connectors to integrate with existing technology management tools, accessing their data and leveraging their agents. An ETM application does not have its own agents, which means it can typically be initially deployed in a few weeks requiring just a few hours of IT resources.
• An ETM database that discovers, aggregates, normalizes, and enriches technology asset data, providing a single source of truth for a company’s entire technology landscape.

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ETM Customer Journey Starts with Endpoint Visibility

Companies typically start their ETM journeys by first adding visibility into their hardware endpoints, typically in only days to a few weeks, while also receiving tangible benefits, such as:

• Reduce wasted spend by improving endpoint recovery rates
• Enhance security with reduced vulnerable attack surfaces
• Improve audit readiness and compliance adherence, as all compliance and security frameworks include hardware endpoint inventory controls.

For instance, using Oomnitza's ETM solution (the industry’s first ETM application):

• Carvana increased their endpoint recovery rate from 50 to 98 percent, saving over 600 thousand dollars a year, no longer replacing ex-employee laptops.
• That Fortune 25 company now leverages an ETM application to manage and provide accurate visibility for almost one million technology assets.
• A city government with a relatively small IT team had an almost full-time employee devoted to manually maintaining spreadsheets to manage their 3000 technology assets. Now with ETM, the spreadsheets are gone, and that employee can focus on more fulfilling and strategic initiatives.
• Factset utilizes that same ETM application to help them meet their Special Economic Zones compliance requirements.

In fact, the first six use-cases for ETM applications, address the challenges of managing enterprise technology, including:

• Improve asset visibility and inventory controls with single source of truth for a company’s entire enterprise technology landscape.
• Enhance security, for instance with improved visibility of endpoints.
• Simplify IT audit readiness with more accurate audit trails.
• Adherence to compliance requirements with improved inventory controls.
• More efficient budget spend, for instance improving endpoint recovery rates and replacing manual labor with automation.
• Enhance IT employee experiences, so employees can focus on more strategic initiatives and more strategically supporting the business.

So, if any of these use cases are challenges for your IT organization, learn how ETM might just be the answer the 12 CIOs expressed the Next CIO needs to realize the vision of autonomous IT.

To do this, consider scheduling a demo of Oomnitza in action – the industry’s first ETM application.

Also to learn more, consider watching my presentation Enterprise Technology is NOT Working, presented at the recent Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies conference in Las Vegas.

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